Welcome to the new Competitor.com, featuring a clean, easy-to-navigate layout that delivers a consistent user experience regardless of whether you’re visiting the website from a desktop, laptop, mobile phone or tablet. The site is built on an adaptive template, which is designed to adjust to the size of the screen you’re using in order to create an optimal user experience.

“The biggest thing we tried to do was clear the clutter and redundancy of the articles on the homepage by modernizing the design,” said lead designer Matthew McAlexander. “Our goal was to get the content that people were looking at the most front and center on the homepage. We also wanted to take a mobile-first mentality and optimize that experience for our readers since more and more people are coming to the site via their mobile devices. We wanted to make the navigation easy to follow and improve the user experience across the board.”

“We wanted to make the site look and feel like like an app,” McAlexander said. “There are side menus that function similarly to Facebook’s, carousels that you can swipe through easily with your thumbs and tools that look and work great right on the page. We tailored the experience to make the site easier for runners to use, whether you’re reading articles, looking for a new route to run or trying to figure out what pace you should try to run for your next race.”

Not only is the site cleaner and easier to navigate, it’s also faster across all platforms with photo galleries you can easily flip through without waiting for the page to refresh and other fun, intuitive elements that make for a more enjoyable user experience.

“Improving the speed of the website was one of our big goals,” said lead developer Joey Hernandez. “We did a lot of things on the backend to improve performance because with our previous template it took a while for some things to load. Our chief aim was a pleasant user experience with improved performance and usability for the reader while adding fun aspects like the animation of the slide bar, marquees and side menus.”

In conjunction with the launch of the new Competitor.com, we’re hosting a “Shoe A Day” sweepstakes, where if you sign up for our weekly newsletter and/or free digital edition of the magazine, you will be entered for the chance to win a pair of the new Ghost 7s from Brooks Running. If you’re already getting our newsletter or digital magazine, simply confirm your subscription for entry into the sweepstakes.